


Night Witches

by gloss



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Aviation, Blackrom, Caliginous Romance | Kismesis, F/F, Historical AU
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-07-14
Updated: 2013-07-14
Packaged: 2017-12-20 05:31:36
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 802
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/883495
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gloss/pseuds/gloss
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>They hate each other almost as much as they love to fly. (Historical, all-human AU)</p><p>HSWC BR #3 <a href="http://hs-worldcup.dreamwidth.org/5337.html?thread=1787097#cmt1787097">prompt</a>: <i>Condesce<b><3<</b>Handmaid, World War II, any location</i></p>
            </blockquote>





	Night Witches

**Author's Note:**

> Contains references to ethnic discrimination.

"Well?" The Empress stands in the doorway, helmet under her arm. The low light makes her look even more imposing than usual; the dark behind her suggests an untamable mane of hair. "Will you be joining me tonight? Or would you rather gossip and chatter and eat everyone's rations?"

Her classmates at Engels Aviation School called her the Empress behind her back because she is haughty, fairly tall, somehow always regal. Even here, despite the rough conditions of camp and stress of their flights, she is never less than perfectly composed and groomed. It follows, then, that her navigator is known as the Handmaid, though she exhibits no servility whatsoever. She is Nivkhi, a small girl, barely coming up to the Empress's shoulder, with glossy black hair, round cheeks and broad breasts and hips, deceptively sweet-looking.

Now those nicknames are their callsigns. The other girls suspect the Empress loves hers; she is arrogant enough to find it fitting, despite her loyalty to the state. The Handmaid, on the other hand, scowls every time she hears her name. One of these days, most of the girls think, she is going to make someone pay dearly for calling her that.

No one knows her real name. They can't pronounce her language and she hates the Russian one she was assigned when she was sent away to school. 

"I'll be right there," the Maid tells her pilot. "We don't scramble for another twenty minutes."

Their plane waits for them in queue on the tarmac. When the wind blows too hard, its plywood and canvas shudder and throb, but when it cruises the treetops, the specific whining shriek it makes through the air is enough to shred the enemy's nerves.

The bombs are just bonuses, gifts of screaming fire that explode to punctuate the terror the flights deliver.

"Oh, suddenly you can keep time?" The Empress snorts at her own joke and touches the back of her hair, twisted up in a tight chignon. "How delightful for you."

"At least I can find the horizon after getting hit," the Handmaid replies. Her upper lip lifts contemptuously and her long-lashed, beautiful eyes have narrowed and darkened.

The Empress turns to go, letting the door slam shut and rattle behind her. The girls huddling around the table wait until they think she is out of earshot, then laugh and slap the Handmaid in congratulations.

She doesn't belong here. She doesn't know quite where she _does_ belong, but wherever she has been, it has never been right. Not growing up in the old man's camp, not at state school in Khabarovsk or glider training outside Moscow.

The closest she gets to feeling _right_ is in the air. Boneshaking flights, tearing through the fresh pine boughs until she's dizzy with the scent and sap is clinging to her face, her maps and instruments clutched in her fists. Then, teeth jumping in her skull, times and intervals and positions glowing in her brain, _then_ she starts to feel almost all right.

She loathes the Empress, with her Russian arrogance and bluntness, and the feeling is fully returned. According to the Empress, the Maid should never have left her igloo. (Of course, Nivkhi don't live in igloos. The Maid doesn't bother to correct anyone; they don't deserve to know _anything_ of her people.)

The mutual hatred, the way they constantly clash and spark and seek each other's pain, fuels their success. They have already flown three hundred missions. They've taken fire, even lost a wing, crashed three times, but they always make it back to base, blaming the other, yelling, fighting, arriving more bruised and battered from each other's blows than the crash itself.

When the Maid leaves the mess, swinging her helmet from her fingers, burying her chin and mouth in her thick muffler, the Empress steps out from the shadows and grabs her by the elbow, yanking her close.

"Don't you _ever_ speak to me like that again."

The Maid smiles, slow, snakelike, and tilts her head. "Oh, are you angry?" She steps even closer, so their bodies touch, the fabric of their flightsuits whispering together. "I cannot say I regret that."

The Empress pulls the Maid's arm up behind her back and shakes her. "Don't test me."

The Handmaid rises up on her toes, her boots creaking in protest. She kisses the Empress with teeth and tongue, brutally, and the Empress responds with an angry grunt, shoving her own tongue against the Maid's.

The Handmaid bites down, then pulls herself free. They are both throbbing like full-body bruises, with anticipation as much as with anger, arousal and anxiety clanging through them.

"Try not to crash," the Handmaid calls as she strides away toward the plane. 

The Empress is panting, her hair coming loose, but, thankfully, no one can see.


End file.
